Ethnography: separating your different selves in a covert filed study of so-called "Status Dog" owners

By virtue of being the owner of registered Pit Bull I had a unique access to an otherwise hard-to-reach group of so called ‘status’ dog owners in South East London. A field journal of mostly covert observations of and participation in a group of ‘status’ dog owners was kept. A more overt approach could not be taken as the research constituted an area central to my own private life. The experience of being at the centre of my own research of these dog owners meant that I was both an insider and outsider at the same time and I had to find a way to separate my private self from my research self and this was done using a reflexive approach. The approach generated rich data, but it was also vulnerable on a practical and personal level as there were no escape route and it was emotionally challenging